Hey Harpies! Here are a handful of posts that have come across in the past week that seem, to me, to engage some important themes around social privilege, economic striving, the constitution of modern neoliberal citizen-workers, and what left-leaning social justice activism (e.g. feminism, queer rights) might have to say to the mainstream notion of self and success.

But somehow I haven’t been able to muster the language to write more incisively about it, so … here are the posts as food for thought. Have at it in comments as you so desire.

I do not aspire to power. I do aspire to do well and to do good but I am somewhat ambivalent about power. That is a result of my upbringing but it is also a result of the many small decisions I have made during my emotional and intellectual development about who I am in relation to power. I will also admit that is greatly shaped by social processes that limit the potential of my access to power. Whether I am accepting those limitations or asserting my own agency is unclear but either way I know that fat, black, southern bodies that went to low-status schools and come from rural, formerly enslaved people have limited avenues into power. Slaughter makes an odd aside to the narrative of “having it all” that includes one needing to be skinny to be boot. It’s an aside for her but a real structural barrier for me. The difference is illustrative.

The whole idea of it makes me feel
like I’m coming down with something,
something worse than any stomach ache
or the headaches I get from reading in bad light–
a kind of measles of the spirit,
a mumps of the psyche,
a disfiguring chicken pox of the soul.

You tell me it is too early to be looking back,
but that is because you have forgotten
the perfect simplicity of being one
and the beautiful complexity introduced by two.
But I can lie on my bed and remember every digit.
At four I was an Arabian wizard.
I could make myself invisible
by drinking a glass of milk a certain way.
At seven I was a soldier, at nine a prince.

But now I am mostly at the window
watching the late afternoon light.
Back then it never fell so solemnly
against the side of my tree house,
and my bicycle never leaned against the garage
as it does today,
all the dark blue speed drained out of it.

Last week, I went down to get the mail from box in the foyer of our apartment building and found this charming bookmark-sized flyer sticking out of the top of each mailbox along the wall:

Image Description: The bookmark-sized flyer is a coupon for a free one-week trial membership at Boston Sports Club, a local gym franchise. The text on the flyer is black on white reading “Reading Expands Your Mind. Sitting Expands Your Butt.”

I’m sick of putting women in a situation where we’re expected to defeat sexism by giving up on other important goals, such as finding love and partnership, or enjoying sexual game-playing, or having families, though that’s not my thing. I just don’t really see a way out of this dilemma, except by putting more pressure on men to relinquish privilege.

People seem to be under the impression that owning a cell phone makes it impossible to be poor, despite the fact that they are ubiquitous in US society; in fact, it can be cheaper to own a cell phone than to carry a land line. And for poor folks, that level of connection can be critically important. A cell phone is needed to find work and network with people, to interact with social services, and, yes, to socialise and build community with friends and people who may work in solidarity together to address specific problems in a given community.

The truth is that children are messy sometimes. And loud sometimes. And they run around sometimes. And they bang on things and drop things. And they and their parents should still be welcome in public spaces. To attempt to eradicate the noise and the mess and the motion is actually an attempt to eradicate the presence of parents and children from public life. If that’s what you mean to do, then you’re an asshole, and I’m not really talking to you. If that’s not what you mean to do, give your words a second thought the next time you’re talking about children in public. Are your words welcoming? Or are your words the ones that send us to hide in the bathroom and push us out in the cold?

How about this: grownups learn that there is a time and a place for sexual propositions. Much like there is a time and a place to ask people if they love Jesus, and a time and a place to tell someone you’re concerned about their health. Rather than making it the responsibility of everyone who doesn’t want attention to list the kind of attention we may or may not want, why don’t we just put into place some social rules about how we approach certain topics and then live by the assumption that decent people understand those rules and that there are consequences for breaking them. So, let’s say you throw your come-fuck-us card at a stranger, you understand that the stranger very well might think you’re a giant asshole who she would not want to fuck. And if you do this within the context of an ongoing discussion within a community already fed up with it’s women leaders being sexualized, it may come up as part of the conversation.

Gentle readers, none of us is getting any younger. It’s not exactly a sad truth—I don’t think my youth had all that much to recommend it besides higher energy levels and someone else paying the bills for the first 21 years—but it’s happening, and these days, as I enter my late 30s, I’m seeing some physical evidence I hadn’t been expecting, and facing the reality that everyone around me is getting older too. As a reader request post, I gathered together a few Harpies from our commenter community for a freewheeling kind of roundtable about the aging process and where it’s taken us, and our feminist ideals.

BeckySharper: To start us off on a totally superficial note, I am getting eyebags, y’all. It isn’t surprising—the women on one side of my family have big ol’ eyebags you could haul laundry in. Now, the women on the other side of my family have had everything nipped and tucked. I think they look kind of “off” but that said…they dont’ have eyebags.. I used to scorn the constant surgification, but now I wonder if I been blithely toeing the anti-surgery, “love your body” party line my whole life simply because it was easy for me to do so? Have I still subconciously bought into the idea that ageing makes women ugly and it is better for me to have tight skin? THE PATRIARCHY WORMED ITS WAY INTO MY BRAIN!

Rodriguez: Of course I am convinced the patriarchy has me brainwashed about what I *have* to look like. The thing about that kind of brainwashing is that it’s so hard to see from the inside. Maybe that brainwashing explains why I think I might be a little narcissistic about clothes and hair even were I a man. I’ll never have a way to know, though.

I’m 46. I’ve been coloring my hair like my life depends on it, at least since I was 30. Also, when I have money I do indulge in some cosmetic procedures. I do the dermal filler around my mouth. And I have a dark spot on my cheek I get chemically lightened. Although, last time I did either of those it was 4 years ago, so I suppose I’m not *that* obsessed with it. (or, I never feel like I have money.) So yeah, aging. I’ve been noticing.

veganmarcy: I’m 33 and I don’t fear wrinkles as much as I fear aging/tan spots and gray hair, and while I’m at it, big blotchy blue patches of varicose veins. Basically, whatever my mom has, although overall she looks very good for her age, even moreso since she went vegan. My mother went silver, then gray, than white-haired very young. My gran lived to her 80s and still didn’t have all gray/white hair. Unfortunately it seems I got my mom’s “Celtic DNA” as she calls her going grey so young, and not just her Raynaud’s. Once I got in my late 20s, let alone hit 30, bam. Thick gray hairs poking up EVERYWHERE. Seeing as I have a penchant for hair colors and styles when I’m flush, at first dye jobs just happened to get things covered up without going out of my way to do so. But now that I can’t afford a stylist and have just been too busy and distracted to give a fuck about dealing with it at home, I’m back to occasionally yoinking out the ones that stick straight up outta my scalp like aging-detecting antennae. It’s enough that I can get gray hairs while still having acne, it’s too much. That’s my achilles heel for aging gracefully – gray hairs. I alternate going “fuck caring! fuck everything! fuckityfuckfuck!” with “dammit, I’d like to feel confident enough to get laid sometime this decade.”

MischiefManager: I recently turned 58. Aging is part of my everyday reality. I’m fortunate in 2 ways here: On the very best day I ever had, I was average looking, and I’ve had a life-threatening illness. So I’m less invested in keeping my looks than women who actually have looks to keep (grin) and I am very aware that the alternative to aging is dying.

Marge Piercy (born 1936) is an American novelist, poet, and social activist.

To Be Of Use

The people I love the best
jump into work head first
without dallying in the shallows
and swim off with sure strokes almost out of sight.
They seem to become natives of that element,
the black sleek heads of seals
bouncing like half submerged balls.

I love people who harness themselves, an ox to a heavy cart,
who pull like water buffalo, with massive patience,
who strain in the mud and the muck to move things forward,
who do what has to be done, again and again.

I want to be with people who submerge
in the task, who go into the fields to harvest
and work in a row and pass the bags along,
who stand in the line and haul in their places,
who are not parlor generals and field deserters
but move in a common rhythm
when the food must come in or the fire be put out.

The work of the world is common as mud.
Botched, it smears the hands, crumbles to dust.
But the thing worth doing well done
has a shape that satisfies, clean and evident.
Greek amphoras for wine or oil,
Hopi vases that held corn, are put in museums
but you know they were made to be used.
The pitcher cries for water to carry
and a person for work that is real.

Prominent anti-marriage-equality theorist David Blankenhorn (a key expert for the supporters of Prop 8 in California, author The Future of Marriage) has recently gone public with his decision to support same-sex marriage as a way to strengthen the institution of marriage overall. He writes in his statement at The New York Times that he hopes this decision to support the right of same-sex couples to marry will re-orient the discussion away from the morality of homosexuality per se and toward question of how society provides for dependent children, and how we can best stabilize existing love relationships. He writes, in part:

I had … hoped that debating gay marriage might help to lead heterosexual America to a broader and more positive recommitment to marriage as an institution. But it hasn’t happened. With each passing year, we see higher and higher levels of unwed childbearing, nonmarital cohabitation and family fragmentation among heterosexuals. Perhaps some of this can be attributed to the reconceptualization of marriage as a private ordering that is so central to the idea of gay marriage. But either way, if fighting gay marriage was going to help marriage over all, I think we’d have seen some signs of it by now.

So my intention is to try something new. Instead of fighting gay marriage, I’d like to help build new coalitions bringing together gays who want to strengthen marriage with straight people who want to do the same. For example, once we accept gay marriage, might we also agree that marrying before having children is a vital cultural value that all of us should do more to embrace? Can we agree that, for all lovers who want their love to last, marriage is preferable to cohabitation? Can we discuss whether both gays and straight people should think twice before denying children born through artificial reproductive technology the right to know and be known by their biological parents?

There’s a lot going on in this statement and I won’t pretend my first response is comprehensive. But here are a few “first thoughts.”

Tonight, Hanna and I are getting out (pre) wedding photos taken by a colleague of mine who does free-lance photography on the side. Hanna doesn’t want photographs taken at the wedding, since having her picture taken makes her uncomfortable, and I’m 100% behind this decision. Instead, we’ve decided to have some pictures made of our hands, together, wearing our custom-made wedding rings, out along the Charles River Esplanade.

Charles River and the Boston skyline

In honor of the day, I thought I’d make a list of ten everyday things I like about Hanna, and the way our lives fit together. And then I thought, why not make it a celebration of our friends, partners, and relations more generally: pick a person (doesn’t have to be a significant other) and share up to ten everyday things that you like about them, and your life with them, in comments.

About a year after its debut, I finally got around to obtaining a copy of Susie Bright’s Big Sex, Little Death: A Memoir (Seal Press, 2011) from our local library network. Bright, for those of you unfamiliar with the name, is a sexuality educator, poet, and activist. She is perhaps most famous (or infamous) in feminist circles as one of the founding editors of On Our Backs, a magazine for lesbian erotica that first appeared in 1984 and became a major player in the lesbian/feminist “sex wars” of the 80s. Bright, along with Carol Queen, Gayle Rubin, Pat Califia, and a handful of other queer folks of varying stripes, were instrumental in articulating a vision of human sexuality and erotic imagination that ran counter to the anti-pornography stance of feminist activists such as Gail Dines, Katherine Mackinnon, and Andrea Dworkin.* As proponents of what eventually became identified as “sex-positive feminism,” Bright and company were banned from college campuses, received death threats, and — in a classic example of Godwin’s Law — were accused of being sexist Nazis, promoting female genocide. Toward the end of Big Sex, Bright writes about visiting the University of Minnesota to speak about “lesbian eroticism in cinema,” only to find herself rushed by a young woman in the restroom “carrying something sharp in her hand.” The would-be attacker stuttered to a halt when she took in Bright’s advanced state of pregnancy, which somehow hadn’t registered during the lecture. “In my protestors’ minds, I was killing women with my wicked ways, not creating new life” (221).

Unlike Carol Queen’s Real Live Nude Girlor Gayle Rubin’s recently-released anthology, Big Sex, Little Death actually has relatively little to say about sex. Or, at least, its primary purpose is not to articulate a politics of sex, or even focus on Bright’s personal experience with sexuality. When sex enters the narrative it does so episodically, with Bright talking about her adolescent sexual fumblings (and, many would argue, the sexual abuse — or at least exploitation — she suffered at the hands of older male leftist organizers), or her on-the-ground frustration with the sexual policing within lesbian feminist circles of the Seventies and Eighties.

These are glances only, rather than a narrative through-line, and at times I found myself frustrated by the lack of reflection from now-Susie on then-Susie’s sexual experiences and what meaning she has made out of them. She describes, for example, how at age fifteen she and her friend-cum-lover Danielle (also fifteen) “seduced” older men, sometimes for fun, sometimes for cash. She describes the sexual availability she was expected to sustain within the socialist groups she was active in as a teenager and into her early twenties, and in contrast to Jeanne Cordova (in When We Were Outlaws) doesn’t spend much ink considering how those sexual dynamics contributed to the way she was used and abused as a youthful activist. While I appreciate the philosophy of being gentle with one’s younger self, at times it feels like Susie-Bright-the-adult has abdicated the role of narrator to such an extent that injuries done to her are overlooked in the memoir as they were unacknowledged at the time.

The most difficult to read — and also most deftly-handled — passages of Big Sex are those dealing with Bright’s relationship with her parents, and to a lesser extent the way in which those deeply troubled interactions shaped her own choices as a parent. [brief descriptions of child abuse below the fold]

This is a guest post written by David Ellert. You see…..we have an anti-choice caravan in our city and while I have been boiling with so much rage that I can’t really comment, here’s a good summary of the feelings!

Hey kids! Just a warning, this lil’ piece is going to be sooooooooo inflammatory that no amount of ibuprofen could ever take away the glaring swelling of reality.

I am tired of hypocritical, obsolete reactionaries calling themselves “Pro Life” and concerning themselves with what choices women make with their bodies. It’s kinda like sticking your nose into somebody’s business. But it’s more like sticking your inconsistent moral code into somebody’s vagina.

I have noticed a few two tonne trucks roaming the city of Winnipeg lately, all decked out in bloody, graphic anti – abortion livery. Cruising down the street for anybody to see are huge full colour images of freshly aborted foetuses and the like.

Nobody wants to see this. Not people on either side of this ridiculous ‘debate.’ Anti – abortion people don’t want to see this because it’s preaching to the choir, and it’s graphic. Their eyes are too fragile. Sensible, democratic people don’t want to see scare tactics pandering to misguided emotion, because they can educate themselves and make their own informed decisions when they choose. Such images are available for those that seek them out. Talk to your doctor.

If you are at a stage in your life when you are considering your options and contemplating parenthood, adoption, or abortion, there are many resources available to you, and the health care community won’t lie to you. When you need them, there are options, and when you need it, there is a wealth of real information to be found. And it won’t be found plastered to the sides of fucking delivery trucks. [Delivery trucks. Ha.]

This poem, first published by feminist author Joan Larkin in 1975, seemed especially relevant this week. Read more about it on Ms. blog.

‘Vagina’ Sonnet

Is “vagina” suitable for use
in a sonnet? I don’t suppose so.
A famous poet told me, “Vagina’s ugly.”
Meaning, of course, the sound of it. In poems.
Meanwhile, he inserts his penis frequently
into his verse, calling it, seriously, “My
Penis.” It is short, I know, and dignified.
I mean of course the sound of it. In poems.
This whole thing is unfortunate, but petty,
like my hangup concerning English Dept. memos
headed “Mr./Mrs./Miss”–only a fishbone
in the throat of the revolution–
a waste of brains–to be concerned about
this minor issue of my cunt’s good name.

And the first rule of Fight Club, as you all know, is we don’t talk about Fight Club. Michigan state rep Lisa Brown (D-obvs) discovered this the hard way when she referred to vaginas by name while discussing an abortion bill in the state’s House of Representatives.

Brown, a West Bloomfield Democrat and mother of three, said a package of abortion regulation bills would violate her Jewish religious beliefs that pregnancy be aborted to save the life of the mother.

“Finally, Mr. Speaker, I’m flattered that you’re all so interested in my vagina, but ‘no’ means ‘no,’” Brown said Wednesday.

First of all, kudos to her for bringing up her religion; anti-abortion Christians who claim freedom of religion means everyone has to accomodate their views would do well to remember that not all religions are opposed to abortion or contraception. But Brown’s use of the scientific term for the female anatomy was just terribly shocking and upsetting to all those male politicians and their delicate sensibilities. Pearl-clutching ensued:

“If I can’t say the word vagina, why are we legislating vaginas?” Brown asked Thursday at a hastily called Capitol press conference. “What language should I use?”

Brown noted “vagina” is the “medically correct term.”

“We’re all adults here,” she said.

Well, yes, but apparently some of us are incredibly prudish adults:

“What she said was offensive,” said Rep. Mike Callton, R-Nashville. “It was so offensive, I don’t even want to say it in front of women. I would not say that in mixed company.”

Let’s stop alternately laughing and head/desking for a moment to unpack the ridiculousness of that statement. Vaginas are so offensive that you can’t mention them in front of women….the people who have them? Does he think our trips to the gynecologist are conducted entirely in charades? Would he prefer that the House records reflect lawmakers calling it a “down there” or “vajayjay”? As for “I would not say that in mixed company”…does he mean he would say it he were hanging out in the men’s locker room with no ladies present? I kinda doubt it. What’s so distressing is a woman discussing the existence of women’s genitals in a legislative session, and doing it with authority.

Of course, the same men who can’t bear to hear the word vagina spoken, or put the word vagina in print the legislative record are the same ones making laws about her vagina. And that’s the real problem.